I visited the Botanical Gardens with a friend of mine, Josh Brown, whose own work can be seen at www.joshbrownphoto.com, who also lives in Montreal and attends Concordia. We were, unfortunately, not permitted to take our tripods into the greenhouses (we visited in the winter during a hard driving snowstorm and the outdoor gardens were frozen) because the pathways were too narrow.

I, being stubborn and experimental, wanted to try the Fujifilm Provia 100 that Josh had given me, and the Kodak Ektachrome 64 and EliteChrome 100, had refused the higher speed films for the resolution the slower speeds would grant me. I had to take quite a good many shots to get this particular composition because I had to concomitantly push the film to 400 ISO and drop the shutter speed down to 1/60 and 1/125 of a second with my Sigma 70-300mm Apo Zoom Lens at nearly full zoom (200mm). However, my practice as a youngster near the bird feeders in the dead of winter with my old Nikon EM, skipping school and taking pictures of chickadees, finches, nuthatches, cardinals, downy and hairy woodpeckers, and the occasional red squirrel, has been finally paying off as of late.

To find out more about the Botanical Gardens in Montreal, please visit: http://www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/jardin/en/propos/propos.htm.